The Man Who Saved the Union
Read The Man Who Saved the Union Online
Authors: H.W. Brands
Copyright © 2012 by H. W. Brands
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Book design by Maria Carella
Cover design by John Fontana
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
Endpaper map by John T. Burgoyne
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brands, H. W.
The man who saved the union : Ulysses Grant in war and peace / H. W. Brands. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822–1885. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. Generals—United States—Biography. I. Title.
E672.B8 2012
355.0092—dc23
[B] 2011043795
eISBN: 978-0-385-53242-6
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
Index
About the Author
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
PROLOGUE
I
N A CHAIR ON THE PORCH OF A COTTAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS, AN OLD
man sits. The summer sun warms the air, the trees, the cottage, the porch; but the old man wears a wool cap and wraps himself in a blanket and still feels cold. Yet he pushes aside his discomfort, even as he ignores the sharp pain in his throat, to focus on his work. Paper and pencil are his instruments, a lap desk his work space. The task transports him beyond his chill, beyond his pain, across the years. He recounts his life for a public that he cannot see but that is watching him, and has been watching him for the two decades since he became the nation’s hero. He hadn’t intended to write his story; he was willing to let the other officers of the Civil War duel for historical reputation. His own reputation was secure: he had commanded the army that defeated the rebellion and held the Union together. Not even Lincoln ranked higher in popular esteem at the moment of victory, and Lincoln was murdered within the week of Appomattox. Other Union generals—Sherman, Sheridan, Meade—had their partisans, including the thousands of soldiers who had served under them. He didn’t begrudge them their laurels, nor did he seek any for himself. The laurels came to him unsought.
He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind’s eye; it was one of the secrets of his military success. He could visualize a battlefield and perceive where the enemy’s weaknesses were and how to exploit them, where his own weaknesses were and how to remedy them. He can visualize his battlefields even now:
Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg,
Chattanooga, the Wilderness,
Cold Harbor, Richmond. He can hear the whistle of the artillery shells, feel their concussion as they exploded, smell the burned powder and the sweat of horses and men.
Most of all he can summon the secret blessing of war: the liberating clarity of purpose felt by those who thrive amid war’s chaos. He remembers his first taste of battle, in Mexico after his graduation from
West Point. He had been frightened on approaching the enemy but discovered that he never functioned better than when under fire. Others became rattled and confused; he grew calm and focused. The end of the
Mexican War left him at a loss; he fumbled through the following decade disappointing himself and those who knew him. He was resigned to mediocrity when another war, the great war for the Union, rescued him.
He doesn’t write so swiftly now as he did when issuing dozens of orders a day. He fell out of the physical habit of writing during his eight years as president, when secretaries took his dictation. That was almost the only advantage life in politics had over life in the military. The business of the military is war, and war is simple and straightforward. In war the objective is plain and the measure of success undeniable. Your side wins or it loses; you live or you die. War is brutal, but its brutality allows differences of opinion to be resolved definitively. In politics things are never so straightforward. In politics differences of opinion are rarely resolved and almost never definitively; in politics the best outcomes are typically compromises that leave all parties grumbling. In politics the ignorant and venal have as much right to their votes as the educated and upstanding.
Of the ignorant and venal he encountered plenty as president. But his problem with politics ran deeper than that, for even good men could differ on solutions to the troubles that vexed America in the wake of the Civil War. He often felt as though he was the last elected official who cared about the freedmen, such criticism did he receive from both parties for the strong measures he took to defend the former slaves against the
Ku Klux Klan and kindred tormentors. He felt likewise lonely trying to secure belated fair treatment for the
Indians. He could claim only modest and passing success in these endeavors, not because bad men defeated him but because good men, weary of the strife of sectional crisis, war and reconstruction, found other things to worry about.
Yet his efforts weren’t wasted. By the time he left office the Union was secure, which was something that could not have been said during most of his sixty-three years of life. The nation was at peace, after a war that had killed six hundred thousand. Democracy survived, for all its flaws and frustrations.
His parents had named him for Homer’s hero of war and wandering,
and as his journey nears its end he marvels at what a strange trip it has been. “I never thought of acquiring rank in the profession I was educated for,” he jots in a journal he keeps to record the final miles. “Yet it came with two grades higher prefixed to the rank of General officer for me. I certainly never had either ambition or taste for a political life; yet I was twice President of the United States.”
The remaining challenge of the journey is to finish his tale. “I must try to get some soft pencils,” he writes as the light fades and his scratchings grow harder to read. “I could then write plainer and more rapidly.” His son is helping. “Buck has brought up the last of the first volume in print. In two weeks if they work hard they can have the second volume copied ready to go to the printer.” If he can hold out that long, he will be able to rest. “I will then feel that my work is done.”
PART ONE 
PROUD WALLS
“Ye kings and warriors! may your vows be crowned,
And Troy’s proud walls lie level with the ground.”
1
T
HE JOURNEY BEGAN GENERATIONS BEFORE HE WAS BORN.
His ancestor
Mathew Grant crossed the Atlantic from England with the Puritans in the 1630s, and subsequent Grants migrated progressively west: to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, Pennsylvania in the eighteenth, Ohio in the nineteenth. Jesse Grant, of the sixth generation of American Grants, for a time lived in Deerfield, Ohio, with a family named
Brown, of whom a son, John, would attempt to start a slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.
Jesse Grant never got much formal education and always felt the lack; he vowed that his sons would not suffer similarly. Jesse married Hannah Simpson in 1821; ten months later, on April 27, 1822, Hannah bore a son they named Hiram Ulysses on the partial inspiration of an aunt with a penchant for the classics. The boy attended private schools, since public education hadn’t reached Georgetown, in southwestern Ohio, where he grew up. At fourteen he was sent across the Ohio River to Maysville, Kentucky, to boarding school, but the experience didn’t take and he returned to Georgetown. At sixteen he enrolled in an academy in Ripley, on the Ohio bank of the Ohio River, with no greater success. He later acknowledged that the failure was his own fault. “
I was not studious in habit,” he said, “and probably did not make progress enough to compensate for the outlay for board and tuition.”